>> A business should always be able to pay a decent wage to employees.
Yeah, what the hell - I made $150 a flight hour as an airline captain. Why not pay everybody that? ANSWER: The marketplace will only pay you $150 or $7.50 or whatever an hour IF you can generate MORE than that amount of goods and services. For that kind of money, I had to make life and death decisions for the 254 people I had strapped to my a$$. The net result of minimum wage laws is that they restrict entry of young and/or unskilled workers into the marketplace. The unions love it!
You mean like pricing third world immigrants who have no skills out of the market? Sounds good to me. If you think decent wages hurt this country so much, then why don’t you offer to take a pay cut. Get all your friends together to offer to take a pay cut, give what you think is necessary to your boss after you cash your pay check. The fact is, rise in minimum wage has never correlated to a rise in unemployment.
http://www.miseryindex.us/urbymonth.asp
As a case study, lets go from the beginning of 1950, where the minimum wage was 75 cents, to October of 1997 where minimum wage was 5.15. Unemployment went down from 6.5% to 4.7%. And the places in between where unemployment above above the 6.5% figure were not correlated to a minimum wage increase, but to other economic events.